WordPress goes back to three major releases a year in 2026, on a four-month cycle. What that changes for maintenance, plus a small logger that catches deprecation notices before the next update lands.
A WooCommerce client hit editor errors after updating to 6.9, with the official fix scheduled for January 2026. Why rolling back was the wrong call and what we filtered instead.
A 15k-product WooCommerce store had red LCP scores and broken layouts after stacking speed plugins. What actually helped: enqueueing block styles properly, plus the Safari LCP support and Compression Dictionaries work from the core performance chat.
A client’s admin was three AI plugins deep, each with its own API key and settings page. The AI Experiments plugin v0.1.0 offers a registry and a base class instead, so features get built once against a standard API.
A client’s custom React admin broke on every core update, so I rebuilt it on what WordPress 6.9 ships instead: DataViews, the wider Fields API, the Abilities API and Block Bindings. Notes from that job.
A Trac ticket listed the bug under 6.8, so I ruled it out. It had been introduced earlier and only found in 6.8. The WordPress 6.9 release comes with a wording fix for exactly that confusion.
A client’s checkout threw a fatal error right after they updated to 6.9, and core wasn’t the cause. Notes on staging updates, and on Trac switching to the version a bug was introduced in.
A WooCommerce store’s next-product links kept reloading the same page after an update. The cause was the WordPress 6.9 tiebreaker in get_adjacent_post(), plus a filter that only swapped the date out of the SQL.
A client updated to WordPress 6.9 the day it shipped and broke their landing page. Here is why I hold major core updates until the first maintenance release, and the filter I use to keep them in staging.
The November 2025 core committers check-in set the direction for WordPress 7.0: PHP 7.4 as the minimum, AI models running in the browser instead of on your server, and a reworked WP Admin.